Sontag, Susan
Sontag, Susan ( 1933 – 2004 ),American cultural critic, essayist, and novelist. Born in New York, she studied at the universities of California, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. Settling in New York as a teacher and an essayist for Partisan Review and other journals, she wrote two experimental novels, The Benefactor ( 1963 ) and Death Kit ( 1967 ), and collected her essays in two volumes, Against Interpretation ( 1966 ) and Styles of Radical Will ( 1969 ), in which she surveys a range of topics, from the ‘camp’ sensibility and pornographic writing to avant-garde music and painting. The title essay of the first volume protests against the hunt for ‘meanings’ in art, calling for a sensuous appreciation of its surfaces. These early essays foreshadow many of the emphases of postmodernism . While undergoing treatment for cancer in the 1970s, she wrote two provocative essays,...
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